“My Adidas walked through concert doors/and roamed all over coliseum floors I stepped on stage, at Live Aid/All the people gave and the poor got paid And out of speakers I did speak/I wore my sneakers but I’m not a sneak”

“My Adidas,” Run DMC

Adidas in the day were the shoe, lauded by rappers Run DMC. But today, the German sporting goods leviathan looks more like a stereotypical rapacious exploiter of cheap labor at all costs. And that criticism is starting to hurt Adidas’ bottom line. Cornell University has cut ties with the German sporting goods megalith. According to Cornell, President David Skorton in a letter to Adidas cited the Worker Rights Consortium and the severance issues surrounding the closing of an Indonesian factory in 2010,

In his letter dated Sept. 13, Skorton wrote that “We believe that severance is a basic worker’s right, as is a living wage, freedom of association and safe working conditions. We are calling on the collegiate apparel industry to develop mechanisms whereby brands can be assured that the factories with which they do business have on hand sufficient and secured funds to pay workers what they are owed should a factory close. This gap in the apparel industry’s approach to worker rights is a critical issue that demands immediate attention.”

Adidas has been the target of sweatshop protesters worldwide, with much of the criticism focusing on the PT Kizone plant in Indonesia, which turned out Adidas and Nike gear. More than 2,800 workers were laid off there but never received the roughly $3 million owed them in severance, and while Nike has kicked in $1.5 million, Adidas has not followed suit. That’s led to a college-centric campaign by the United Students Against Sweatshops activist group, which has been calling for universities to cut contractual ties with Adidas, with Cornell being their first victory.

Time in the military can teach a person a lot, from personal discipline and leadership to the ins and outs of operating an M39 armored utility vehicle. And seeing combat up close and first hand also makes one a lot more adverse to taking chances with money, according to new Cornell University research.

The study breaks down data from a previous University of Illinois survey of U.S. military veterans. According to study results, non-combat vets were statistically more likely than their counterparts who had seen combat to invest in stocks, bonds, mutual funds and money market accounts, while combat vets were more likely to put their money in savings accounts.

According to the paper, the findings fly in the face of traditional economic theories, which held that when it came to investment decision making, people generally hold certain preferences for risk that are unchanged by their life experiences.

The paper “Do Psychological Shocks Affect Financial Risk Taking Behavior? A Study of U.S. Veterans” is to appear in a forthcoming issue of Contemporary Economic Policy.

A former housekeeper testified that businesswoman Leona Helmsley once sniffed in a Marie Antoinette moment that “Only the little people pay taxes.” BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg in 2010 had to do a public mea culpa after publicly referring to people hurt by the Gulf oil spill as “small people.” And our lexicon is filled with references that link executive power with physical size – the Big Boss, Mr. Big. Now a study by researchers at Cornell University’s Industrial Labor Relations school and Washington University confirm it – the more powerful you are, the bigger you literally physically feel.

The study consisted of a series of experiments in which people were manipulated to feel like they were either in a powerful or powerless class and then asked to estimate their height in comparison to a pole that was always 20 inches taller than them or asked to create a computer avatar for themselves. And throughout the experiments, according to the researchers, people in power positions would tend to results or answers that indicated they perceived themselves as taller when they were in a powerful position. The study, according to Cornell, will appear in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science.

Past research has famously shown that tall people typically earn bigger paychecks and are more likely to be found in higher-status jobs. So forget networking, that degree from a prestigious college or any of the other tips or tricks for getting ahead. Instead, look first to some shoe inserts.

As the United States tries to figure out what to do with its hugely expensive and inefficient health care system, everyone keeps looking to our neighbors to the north. For critics of single-payer systems and greater government intervention, Canada is a cautionary tale of long waits to get procedures done. And those who decry the huge numbers of uninsured in the US, Canada’s nationalized health care system is a model to emulate. Canada’s health care system undoubtedly has its issues and flaws. But if you’ve got a medical practice, being a doctor in Ottawa sounds a good bit less stressful and expensive than being a doctor in Ohio. According to a new study by Cornell University researchers in the August issue of the journal Health Affairs finds that US MDs spend roughly $83,000 worth of time and labor dealing with insurance companies and the government, compared to about $22,000 for Canadian docs.

That sizable business cost is not so sizable in the Great White North because of the simpler single-payer system vs. the array of different forms, requirements and regulations that come with each payer in the United States, according to the Cornell study. According to the study: the average US doctor spends 3.4 hours a week interacting with health plans, while their nurses or practice staff spend 20.6 hours per physician per week. Canadian docs, meanwhile, spend 2.2 hours a week while their staffs spend 2.5 hours a week on paperwork.

Those hours add up. According to the study, total health spending per capita in the United States, adjusted for differences in purchasing power, is 87 percent more than in Canada, with administrative costs being one big contributor to the difference.

To be sure, as the study points out, that extra $27.6 billion spent in the US due to those administrative costs is not necessarily “waste,” as a lot of the policies and procedures the government and insurance companies have in place that necessitate so much medical professional time spent dealing with billing codes and the like are aimed at keeping health care costs from rising so quickly.

So what’s to be done? The study authors recommend standardizing transactions and conducting them electronically vs. mail or phone would cut down on such “hassle factor” and its expense. And there may be some moves toward that, as the Institute of Medicine, the Massachusetts General Physicians Organization, UnitedHealth Group, and the Healthcare Administrative Simplification Coalition have recently come out with such recommendations as common standards for interactions such as billing and prior authorization and as making all standard interactions electronic.

But given the monolith that is the health care system in the United States, don’t hold out hope for quick changes. And if you’re a doctor running your small practice, prepare to stay on hold on the phone as you try to sort out billing issues.

The May 6, 2010, stock market crash was a doozy. The Dow Jones dropped 900 points in a matter of minutes, only to recover them nearly as quickly. After months of investigation, the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission jointly issued a report about the events leading up to that so-called Flash Crash. In it, they pointed to a series of events, including a mutual fund doing a particularly large sale triggered aggressive sales by a variety of traders, with all that activity snowballing into the sharp drop in prices.

But such a Flash Crash may be both predictable and preventable. A formula developed by a variety of Cornell University researchers and the head of high frequency futures trading at Conn. private equity firm Tudor Investments Corp. Their volume–synchronized probability of informed trading metric looks at the imbalance of trade in relation to the total volume of the market. According to Cornell, market regulators using that formula could get warning of “flow toxicity” – the market condition when buyers and sellers are doing the opposite of what they want to do – and then adjust the markets to keep them from swinging so wildly. It also might give traders a warning so that they don’t necessarily have to be concerned about a market crash and thus preventing them from dumping their own shares quickly.

The Flash Crash again highlights what I’ve long thought about the stock market – that it might be a good investment vehicle long term, but to try to make a living buying and selling on a daily basis (either working for a firm or as an individual) is an exercise in maddening futility. You’re doing your eTrade work and all of a sudden, for no discernible reason, you see things plummeting, of course you’re going to get out as quickly as possible at least until you see what’s going on. Meanwhile, you’re out cash and maybe have also missed the opportunity to buy in when stocks were temporarily way low. There’s got to be an easier way.

Reasonable people can debate and discuss the reasons for the globe’s warming trend as demonstrated by such things as melting glaciers around the planet. But one thing that’s irrefutable – global warming is going to mess up the timing of New York State Maple Producers Association’s annual Maple Weekend, held in March.

According to new Cornell University research, maple syrup production in the Northeast is expected to slightly decline by 2100 and the time for tapping maple trees for their sap will move up by about a month.

Currently, maple tapping is about an eight-week window in late winter and early spring. By 2100, maple tapping will likely be closer to Christmas, according to Brian Chabot, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and a co-author of a paper on climate changes and maple sugar production that appeared earlier this year in the journal Climate Change.

The flow of sap is related to pressure changes in the tubes in bark that carry sap from roots up to the leaves. And the best flow of sap comes when temperatures swing just above and below freezing.

The study used global climate computer modeling at the regional level to look at daily temperatures across the sugar maple range, which reaches from North Carolina to Quebec to Minnesota, from 1970 to 2100.

Currently, according to the study, the start dates for tapping maples is about a week earlier than it was in the 1970s. Meanwhile, maple production south of Pennsylvania might end altogether by 2100 due to a lack of freezing, though production in Quebec could gain from the climate changes, according to Chabot.

Attention people hoping to make extra cash or a living off online poker: Kenny Rogers was right – sometimes you have to know when to walk away, know when to run.

According to a new Cornell University study, the more hands won by online poker player, the less money they actually win.

The study looked at 27 million online poker hands and concluded that multiple wins typically are for small stakes, while meanwhile the longer a person plays the more likely that person will end up losing big amounts on occasion. The study was on the online version of the last month and will be in a forthcoming print edition.

According to Cornell, the results line up with previous behavioral economics findings that people will feel reinforced by a streak of wins but have difficulty in keeping accurate tabs of how occasional large losses offset those wins.

Diana Louise Carter was born at Rochester General Hospital the same year it opened and reared in Bristol, Ontario County. After college and grad school, her first reporting job was on a small newspaper in Western Massachusetts. She returned to Rochester in late 1987 to work for the Democrat and Chronicle. Carter covers agriculture and banking. She lives in the Upper Monroe neighborhood of Rochester with her husband and three children.

Matthew Daneman is a business reporter with the Democrat and Chronicle, covering imaging, optics, printing, telecommunications, manufacturing and a host of other topics. He lives in Rochester with his wife, Sheila. If he could have authentic western N.Y. chicken wings morning, noon and night, he would.

Tom Tobin has 30 years experience with Gannett newspapers as an editor and reporter. He lives in Rochester and has two children: Lia, 16, and Melissa, 11.